Mageia 4.1 Officially Released with New Linux Kernel

The latest version of Mageia can be downloaded from Softpedia

Mageia 4.1, a GNU/Linux-based free operating system that started its life as a fork of Mandriva Linux and that is supported by a nonprofit organization of elected contributors, has been released and is now available for download.

It’s been a few months since the official release of Mageia 4.0 and the developers have now made available the first maintenance version for this Linux distribution. It’s interesting to note that this update wasn't planned, so users were taken by surprise.

"While most of the world is turned towards Brazil to enjoy the World Cup, Mageia has been preparing its own major worldwide event: Mageia 4.1 has been released!"

"If you were not expecting it, you might wonder what this unannounced 4.1 version is. It is a maintenance release for Mageia 4 which contains all security and bugfix updates that were issued since the release in February 2014. In particular, the Mageia 4 ISO images were affected by an upstream syslinux bug which prevented installation using a burned DVD on some older hardware," said the developers in announcement.

Another important update the devs made in the new Mageia is the adoption of a new Linux kernel, 3.12.21. This is the latest long-term support version of the kernel, but it’s not the most advanced out there. Users will find newer releases in the repositories, but installing them is not recommended.

Other updates include the latest Mozilla Firefox and LibreOffice, and the new version of OpenSSL, which takes care of all the security issues found until now. That includes the "Heartbleed" bug.

Mageia 4 features a lot of desktop environments and most users will find something they like in the download section: KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce, RazorQt, MATE, and Cinnamon.

The good news is that, if you are running Mageia 4 and you are updating the system on a regular basis, you won’t have to do anything extra. All the updates mentioned above are already in place.

Even if this is a stable release, the Mageia team relies on the community to find any problems that might creep up. Users are advised to notify the development team if they stumble onto a bug or problem.

The developers have also announced that the first Mageia 5 Alpha version should arrive in July, so get your systems ready for some testing.